Hell Hath No Fury
by Ashabagawa
Summary: Aaron Cross and Jason Bourne meet in Northern France. They have a lot to talk about. Across the channel, MI6 are livid after the shooting of Guardian journalist Simon Ross in Waterloo Station, London. A line has been crossed, James Bond is told, and his job is to re-draw it. Clearly. In blood. After all, hell hath no fury like an agency ridiculed.


Chapter One – Coffee and Blood

_4.36pm, 15km outside Laon, between Rheims and Saint-Quentin, Northern France_

Jason Bourne slid into the booth next to the window, setting his cup of coffee down on the slightly sticky Formica table. He propped his backpack up on the bench next to him and noticed that one of the zips was broken. It had snagged somehow, unzipped on both sides of the little black toggle. He'd have to find a new one soon, or everything would keep falling out. He tucked a protruding yellow wire back inside and re-zipped it.

It was getting dark outside, and soon only the headlights of the vehicles moving on the E17 motorway would illuminate the quiet car park. For now however, the cars remained visible in the dusky gloom.

The number plates engraved themselves into his memory. He remembered sitting in a similarly grotty café, reading number plates. That was a few years ago and he'd had more than his backpack for company. His memory shut down then. Not because he didn't have the ability to remember, like the constant numb sensation of amnesia he'd grown used to, but because remembering was painful. He didn't want to go there. Not now.

A red Chevrolet Cruze, with a German plate number reading AJ34 YKF, pulled into the _Aires_ car park.

Bourne straightened and watched as it pulled into a space and the engine died. The Chevrolet was wrong. After a moment, the door opened and a man stepped out, a backpack, similar to Bourne's, slung over his left shoulder.

Fair hair, dark jacket, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. From inside his own fleece, Bourne pulled out a grainy passport photo, crudely cut out of a newspaper. He glanced back up at the man making his way across the car park. Aaron Cross. It could be him.

Bourne turned away from the window and took a swig from his coffee. And waited.

Aaron Cross slid into the seat opposite him exactly forty-eight seconds later. The sunglasses were folded and tucked into the pocket of his jacket.

"Your bag is broken," Cross said, without looking at it.

"I know." They surveyed each other, over the stained, sticky table. Blue eyes into grey. "You had a tail?"

"No. Clear from Namur." Cross folded his arms over his chest. Bourne wasn't how he'd expected him to be. His close-cropped hair and strong features were familiar from the photographs he'd seen on the news and in the papers, but there was something unnervingly _human _about the guy that had caused the CIA so much trouble. He was wearing an unflattering green fleece that had a hole near the collar and fatigue seemed to be smudged into the hollow crevices under his eyes and the ridges of his cheekbones. A cut, on the left side of his jaw, had scabbed over. Cross doubted he'd got it shaving. "So how do want to do this?" Cross asked.

'I'll go first." Bourne reached into his bag. Cross covertly slid his hand down to the Beretta M9 automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans. Bourne glanced up, a ghost of a smile on his lips, before pulling a bundle of papers out of his bag. He spread them out on the table and Cross realised they were newspapers. His own face stared up at him, appearing slightly hazy through the bad quality of the print. CIA FIREFIGHT: AGENT MUTINY, Cross read. He smiled. "They missed out the bit where they murdered a bunch of their own agents," he said. "Convenient."

"They've shut down the programme?" Bourne asked, leaning forward. "What about Pamela Landy? What happened to her?"

Cross blinked. "Landy?" he asked.

"Yeah. Pamela Landy. Blackbriar. Treadstone. I thought they'd shut the programmes down."

"Landy's on suspension," Cross said. "She's on trial. Helping you was professional suicide. They say she committed treason when she went public with Blackbriar and Treadstone. They've still managed to block a load of it from the press with the trial. They're all being investigated, Landy, Kramer and Vosen, the Blackbriar guy. "

"And Treadstone?"

"Gone." Cross folded his arms again and leaned back in his seat. "But there were other programmes."

"What programmes?"

"Outcome. You never heard of it?"

Slowly, Bourne shook his head.

"Creating super-soldiers. They had us all on specially engineered chems." Cross glanced out of the window. It was almost totally dark now, the vague outline of the cars only just visible against the inky blue of the sky. "But then it went wrong somehow," he continued, still staring into the blackness. "They wanted to delete the programme, so they picked us off, one by one. I'm the only one left."

The café was quite now. The car park was almost empty, the only vehicles left were Cross's Chevrolet, a Citroen C4, a Nissan Micra K11 and, closest to the window, parked just outside, a battered blue truck.

"Is that it?" Cross asked. Bourne turned away from the window to find him staring at him. "Is that all you wanted?"

Bourne frowned, thinking. He nodded, before frowning again. "Super-soldiers?" he asked.

Cross sniffed. "Yeah," he said. "It worked. But then they tried to kill everyone."

"Seems to be a lot of that going around lately."

Cross eyed Bourne warily. 'You know," he began cautiously. "When I got your call, I had no idea. I didn't know what to think. I thought you were going to try and kill me."

The words hung in the air for a moment, as if waiting to be heard properly. Bourne suddenly turned back to the car park. Only two vehicles remained. Cross's Chevrolet and the battered blue truck. His truck. The café was deserted.

He turned back to Cross. Cross was aiming a Beretta M9 lazily at Bourne's temple.

"I'm sorry," Cross said. "I just couldn't take any chances." He cocked the pistol.

"No," Bourne replied, his hand curled over the detonator in his pocket. "Me neither."

The blue truck exploded, ripped apart by a ball of fire, engulfed in flame. The window smashed from the intense power of the fireball. Cross and Bourne were thrown from their seats, Cross hitting the countertop and Bourne flung over the next table.

The dust settled. The fire cracked as it consumed the blackened carcass of the truck. Winded, Cross pulled himself up from the counter and turned, only to be hit straight in the face with a soup ladle.

He dropped the gun to the floor and wheeled backwards, spitting blood onto the countertop. Bourne bent down and swapped the ladle for the gun. With a slight limp, he advanced on Cross's slumped form. Blood trickled down his temple and he blinked it out of his eye.

"I'm not going to kill you," he shouted, as the fire howled behind him. "She wouldn't have wanted me to." Cross rolled over and, through a blackened eye, squinted up at him, palms held high in surrender. "Keys," Bourne spat. Cross carefully reached into the pocket of his jeans and retrieved the keys to his car. He held them high, let them swing jovially beneath his palm and Bourne snatched them greedily.

Keys clenched tightly in his fist, Bourne backed away from him, gun still aimed at his chest, carefully making his way through the rubble of the café. Cross watched him reach the Chevrolet and climb in. The car pulled out of the car park and into the night, its headlights bending with the others on the E17.

Cross sat up with a groan. That was Jason Bourne. The legend. He'd been wearing a fleece with a hole in it for Christ's sake. He was no super-soldier.

And yet he was the one driving away from this mess. The super-soldier was sitting on his ass in the middle of a burning café. Gingerly, Cross pulled himself to his feet, wincing. Once upright, he began to make his way down the path Bourne had made through the rubble.

Bourne's backpack, the one with the broken zip, was lying a few feet away, a yellow wire protruding from the gap. Stooping painfully, Cross scooped it up and slung it over his shoulder. There was more to this Bourne guy that he'd first thought, and he was going to work out what it was he wanted.

He pulled an iPhone from his jacket pocket. Sent a text.

The cavalry were coming.


End file.
